Existing processing systems include an operating system (OS) and one or more applications. Due to a number of entities, such as, for example, systems and applications, and a significant number of relationships among the entities, the existing processing systems are extremely complex, such that many OS deployment and OS management scenarios are too non-deterministic. For example, in some processing systems, changing one bit of a system setting, or configuration information, may cause the processing systems to crash. In addition, simply installing an application on a processing system may cause the processing system to behave in an unpredictable manner because the application may directly modify contents of memory locations, which may store data that belongs to other applications or the OS.
In existing processing systems, nothing exists to guarantee integrity of a state of an OS. That is, at any given time, no one can predict with 100% certainty how the OS will behave based on the state. Further, no tools exist that indicate, deterministically, that if a particular change is made to an OS state, that a particular result will occur.